[AccessD] Mail Merge

John Colby jcolby at colbyconsulting.com
Fri Sep 26 20:49:17 CDT 2003


OK, my client's mail merge project is getting off the ground and I have no
experience at this and I need some info.

Background: (How I envision it)

The system will allow the user to select contact info - name / address /
phone from up to 3 different tables, placing the selected contact info into
a local table in the FE.  One address will be designated as the "To"
address, with all others CC addresses.

This info will be used to build up a merged document with info such as claim
number, claim info etc.  The "TO" address will be embedded in the document
along with the other data.  However many addresses are selected will
determine the number of copies of this document printed.

A second document will be printed with only the address info, this to be
used to slide into the envelope window to get the "CC" copies to the right
place.

The user can select the document they wish to send as part of this process,
i.e. there will be a combo that pulls all the document names out of a
directory and allows selecting which document to send.

I will create a query for each document, and (preferably) the document knows
what query to use to pull the data.  The queries will in all cases be
filtered to a specific claim simply because they are on that claim when they
click on a tab to do this mail merge process.  IOW, they go to (actually
live in) the claim form which already has many tabs displaying child info to
the claim.  I will be adding another tab that allows them to select the
document to merge, the people to send the doc to and then press a button
that fires off a process to do it all.

Questions:

* Can I open a mail merge document and cause the merge to happen, but leave
the doc open to allow edits?
* Can I lock specific areas of the document so that those areas cannot be
edited?
* Is the merged data ever editable?  I may need to lock some but allow other
merged data to be edited.
* Assuming I can do that, can I then tell the document (Or Word) to print N
copies of the document where N may change from day to day.  IOW, I do not
want the user to have to remember (or even have to know) how many copies to
print.  So the doc opens, they edit it, then somehow say "print" or "Cancel"
but I have already told Word how many copies to print if they hit the print
button.
* After that document closes I need to know if the user actually printed the
N copies of the document or canceled out (closed word without printing?) so
that if they did print, I can then print N-1 copies of the address document
for the windowed envelopes.  How do I know if the user printed or canceled
without asking them as they come back to Access?
* Can I somehow prevent saving the document?  They have no use for the
document itself after printing and I specifically don't want them saving a
merged document back over the top of the original "Template".  I suppose I
could brute force that by setting a Read-Only attribute on the hard disk but
would prefer to somehow disable the save button in Word.  I guess what I
really want is to disable the menus and toolbars in Windows and enable a
custom toolbar of my own or something like that.

Has anyone ever done this stuff specifically, REAL specific help on how to
do this?  I can handle the Access side of things but don't know anything
about how to make Word do what I want.

TIA,

John W. Colby
www.colbyconsulting.com



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